Today there are still a lot of questions around getting the workforce back into the office, clinic or manufacturing site. Digital health company Truepill is looking to address this issue by teaming up with the Health Transformation Alliance to offer Truepill's new employer-focused suite of COVID-19-focused diagnostics and digital tools to the former's members.

Truepill's new program will incorporate at-home or worksite COVID-19 testing, virtual care, medication delivery and contact tracing, as well as an employer-facing platform to help clients manage the workforce.

"If you imagine buying a new home, and you have to remodel it, and you are doing it yourself," Sid Viswanathan, cofounder and president of Truepill, told MobiHealthNews.

"Well you could do it yourself and go to YouTube, and we could figure out how to fit all these pieces. But there's a lot of stuff that could go wrong when you loop in the electrical or plumbing. A lot of bad things could happen. I think it's a very similar analogy in the employer market today. We as a diagnostics business have to be at the forefront of guiding this market through the next phase."

The suite is customizable, and employers can pick and choose which tests they would like to offer and how they would like to structure their return to work plan, with the support of Truepill.

"We are customizing this down to an employer level to say: Okay, do you want antigen test A and B? Do you want PCR test C, and you want a contract-tracing module? Great. Now tell us about what admin control you want as the employer. What do you need to be able to see and what are we going to do in that case?

"What happens if this is a manufacturing plant where everyone has to show up every day, versus an office setting where you only want to introduce 20% of the population back? Let's layer in this concept of vaccinations, and how do you want that to be an input to who can come back to work safely, and in what order?" Viswanathan said.  

It's no surprise that Truepill  is moving into the diagnostics space. After closing its Series C funding round in September, the company announced it would be using the funds to expand its at-home testing services. While today's news is focused on COVID-19, the company said that the future of its at-home diagnostics business will be looking to chronic diseases.

"It was always part of our playbook to expand from pharmacy and telehealth into diagnostics, because when you start to treat some of the chronic conditions in our country today, whether it is diabetes, or cholesterol or hyper tension, oftentimes to do that over a virtual setting, your doctor needs a lab test," Viswanathan said.

"If I'm going to prescribe cholesterol medication and I'm a doctor, I need to see a lipid panel for a patient, so for us it … [was] an extension of our core pillars."

WHY IT MATTERS

While more and more people in America are getting vaccinated, the COVID-19 pandemic still rages on. The World Health Organization reports that over 2.7 million new cases of the virus were reported last week.

Over the last year the US has seen close to 30 million COVID-19 cases, according to the CDC. However, things are looking up, in the US as 95.7 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed.

While the CDC has guidelines for protecting yourself and others in the workplace, there are still a lot of questions.

THE LARGR TREND

Truepill got its start in the pharmacy space. It works with digital health brands and pharma manufactures and health plans to connect patients to pharmacy services. Its clients include direct-to-consumer sites like Hims & Hers and GoodRx.  It has more recently evolved into including telehealth services.

In September, it scored $75 million in Series C funding just months after closing a $25 million Series B round.